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| Today, Ed Wood has something on his mind. |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "A Thought on Fetish Love Objects." Originally published in Young Beavers (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 6, no. 1, March/April 1972. No author credited.
Excerpt: "Fetish love-objects are as varied as the mind might conceive. Some say the hair fetish comes from the thought that Christ was crucified while wearing a hair shirt . . . thus a double meaning . . . hair and religious values."
Reflections: The term "love-object" is used so frequently in When the Topic is Sex that I can't believe I hadn't noticed it as one of Ed Wood's trademarks earlier than this. It definitely belongs on the list. And now, Eddie has devoted an entire article to it. You might guess that a "love-object" is a dildo, vibrator, or some other marital aid, but that's not necessarily what Eddie means. In the context of this article and others, it's any inanimate, non-living object that arouses sexual feelings in a person. Here, he focuses specifically on clothing and hair.
Predictably, Eddie's take on hair fetishism is a little warped. He says that a woman with long, flowing hair might wrap her luscious locks around her lover's genitals or even use "the hair upon her own body for her own pleasures." Not being a hair fetishist myself, I can't really say whether this is how it works or not. He also describes a young husband driven to violent rage when his wife gets a short haircut.
Actually, a more accurate title for this article would be "A Handful of Half-Baked Ideas Vaguely Related to Love Objects." For some reason, Eddie spends several paragraphs talking about how newlyweds reveal their fetishes to one another. It doesn't always go well, as Ed illustrates with this example:
There was the story in one of the syndicated columns of a major newspaper recently about the newlyweds who got to their hotel room, stripped, then when the girl was about to put on her wedding nightie the new husband took it from her and put it on himself. Shocked, the girl screamed down the building and the fellow raced out of the room never to be heard of again . . . except in the divorce courts.
Anyone halfway familiar with Ed Wood's own biography will be immediately reminded of the director's disastrous, short-lived marriage to actress Norma McCarty, who couldn't abide Eddie's cross-dressing. Brief as it was, the Wood/McCarty marriage led to some of the more memorable anecdotes in Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992).
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| Kathy Wood and Paul Marco discuss Ed's marriage to Norma McCarty. |
These stories were dramatized for Tim Burton's film Ed Wood (1994), but unfortunately they landed on the cutting room floor.
As with other articles in When the Topic is Sex, "A Thought on Fetish Love Objects" cites several works by other authors. First up is The American Dictionary of Sexual Terms (1964) by Blake Roger. According to Blake, armpits are a "classic" fetish. Go figure. This glossary-style book is very real and easily found today on the secondary market. Eddie concludes his own book, Bloodiest Sex Crimes of History (1967), with what he terms "the hottest sex glossary ever compiled." (Ed's list even includes the little-used "ecouterism") I wonder if he cribbed much from Blake Roger?
Even more interesting, Ed mentions an article by Sylvia Lazio called "Queer for Hair" from the January 10, 1971 issue of The National Bulletin. I can't pinpoint this exact article, but The National Bulletin was a sex-themed tabloid published in the early 1970s by a New Rochelle, NY-based company called Beta. It combined nude cheesecake photos with salacious articles like "Perverts Make the Best Athletes" and "Is America Losing the Sex Race?"
Ed Wood also mentions an article by Buzz Torin in The National Spotlite. This was another Beta publication—same format as Bulletin, very similar content. It cannot be a coincidence that Eddie would mention two Beta tabloids in the same article. Maybe, as someone working in the adult magazine industry, Ed Wood kept, uh, abreast of what the competition was doing. But you'd think that Bernie Bloom would insist that Eddie plug other Pendulum/Calga titles instead!
Next: "Madam Had a Peep" (1971)